Software Growth

CES (Customer effort score)

Customer effort score (CES) measures how easy it was for a customer to get something done, and it predicts loyalty better than how delighted they were.

Customer effort score asks one thing: how hard did we make this for you? The idea came out of research that found loyalty depends more on removing friction than on impressing people. For a SaaS company, effort shows up in setup, in support, in billing and in cancellation. Where effort is high, churn follows.

Where it comes from

In the 2010 Harvard Business Review article "Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers," Matthew Dixon, Karen Freeman and Nick Toman (then at the Corporate Executive Board, now part of Gartner) challenged the belief that companies must exceed expectations. They argued that delight is rare and does little for loyalty, while reducing effort matters much more. Their metric, the customer effort score, came out of that work.

How to calculate CES

Right after an interaction, ask a statement such as "The company made it easy for me to handle my issue." Customers answer on a 7-point scale from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (7). The score is the average.

Example: ten customers answer after setup: 7, 6, 7, 5, 6, 3, 7, 6, 7, 4. The sum is 58, so:

Your CES is 5.8 out of 7. Some teams instead report the share of answers at 5 to 7. Choose one and keep it. A rise in the share of 1 to 3 responses is a clear alarm.

What good looks like

There is no universal benchmark, since scales and wording vary. A practical rule: aim for an average above 5 on the 7-point agreement scale, and chase down the 1 to 3 responses individually. The Zonka Feedback guide summarizes Gartner-linked research that low-effort experiences lead to higher repurchase intent and fewer repeat contacts. I could not read the HBR paywalled text, so I do not quote its figures here.

When to use it

  • After support conversations and help-center visits.
  • After a key task: finishing setup, connecting an integration, changing a plan, exporting data.
  • After a cancellation or billing change, where friction is most costly.

CES versus NPS and CSAT

NPS asks about the whole relationship and CSAT asks how satisfied someone was. CES asks about difficulty and is the one that points straight at a fix: a slow import, a confusing invoice screen, a support answer that needs three replies.

For small SaaS

Track the effort in your onboarding and in your top five support topics. If one topic generates many tickets, the product is making customers work. Fixing the cause is cheaper than answering the ticket every week, and it is the most reliable way to reduce voluntary churn.

Sources

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